Green Daily

Coral reefs are teeming with even more life than we previously realized. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) just completed a marine life inventory and discovered all kinds of previously unknown coral and aquatic creatures on the Great Barrier Reef and Ningaloo Reef.

I'm not that squeemish, but it does seem like the new discoveries were heavier on the creepy-stuff spectrum. For example, they found over 100 new kinds of isopods, a parasitic creature that lives in the mouths of fish, and eats their tongues.

Another new creature has claws that are longer than their bodies. The good news with that one is that it's a kind of shrimp, so you don't have to worry (much) about them grabbing unsuspecting scuba divers and dragging them back to their lairs. But even if they don't get you, the leech-worm cousins called polychaetes or "bristle worms" might.

The inventory was done as a baseline measurement of marine life, as part of a the global Census of Marine Life. The census will be published in 2010. In the meantime, the marine biologists will continue to catalog the creepy crawlies under the sea.